May 11 – Former football federation finance leader Canover Watson (pictured), a close friend and associate of disgraced former Concacaf president Jeff Webb, has had his Cayman Islands residential status revoked because of his criminal convictions.
Watson was a former treasurer of the Cayman Islands Football Association (CIFA), vice-president of the Caribbean Football Union (CFU), and a member of FIFA’s financial audit and compliance committee, and well as a member of Concacaf’s finance committee.
He is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for fraud and money laundering whilst treasure of CIFA. He had already been convicted and sentenced to seven years in a separate case for defrauding the Cayman Islands Health Authority via skimming money off its CarePay patient swipe-card contract.
Watson, who reportedly holds Jamaican and British passports, was refused application for a judicial review to overturn the decision by the Immigration Appeals Tribunal.
Watson said he had been given “speculative and factually incorrect advice” by the director of public prosecution’s office and that the pressures of defending himself as a lay person in his other cases had not allowed him an opportunity to appeal within the unclear timescales.
Under Caymanian legislation, an individual’s right to be Caymanian, or hold Caymanian status, can be revoked if that person has been convicted of a criminal offence that has resulted in a prison sentence of 12 months or more, and if the person’s rights of appeal have been exhausted.
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In the football fraud trial he was found guilty of sending false invoices for $1.54 million to Concacaf. Alongside co-accused Bruce Blake he was found guilty of two counts of false accounting. Both Watson and Blake were senior officials at the Cayman Islands Football Association when the offences took place in 2013 and 2014.
Watson used $600,000 of the proceeds from the false invoices for football equipment that was never delivered to pay down a bank loan that he and Jeff Webb, the CIFA and CONCACAF president at the time, personally guaranteed.
Watson and Blake were found guilty of false accounting for creating two fake loan agreements used to cover questioning of two $600,000 payments by CIFA’s auditors.
Watson was accused of syphoning money from Concacaf, run by Webb, with invoices that were approved by Concacaf general secretary Enrique Sanz.
Watson sent the invoices from a Panama company, Forward Sports International Management Inc, that had a similar name to Pakistan-based football manufacturer Forward Sports (PVT) Ltd that Concacaf did have a relationship.
Shakeel Khawaja, a sales representative for Forward Sports (PVT) Ltd, testified that he had no knowledge of the false invoices, related production orders or the $1.54 million received by the company. Concacaf was unable to track down any of the goods listed in the three invoices.
Watson used some of the embezzled money to pay off his personal American Express credit card bills.
About $300,000 was used to buy genuine sports equipment from Forward Sports, after Concacaf officials questioned the whereabouts of the items in the three fake invoices.
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